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About Robert Farago

Robert Farago is the Publisher of The Truth About Guns (TTAG). He started the site to explore the ethics, morality, business, politics, culture, technology, practice, strategy, dangers and fun of guns.

24 Responses to New TTAG Photo Series: I Own Guns

Show up at your state capitol this Saturday – Jan 19th at noon! Guns Across America is organizing a peaceful demonstration to remind America of the fact that gun owners are not all camo-wearing psychopaths. Gun owners are mostly typical Americans

As soon as I get home from work, you’ll be getting my email. I’ll make sure to pass this along to my brother and any other gun owners I can think of.

That reminds me, I live in Everett, WA, and I’m trying to find a ride down to the Olympia (state capital) for the rally on saturday. Any north-seattlites among this blogs readers? Wanna give me a ride?

At the risk of being whipped for saying this, what good will it do? The only ones who will see it will be other TTAG readers, so this is just preaching to the choir. The ones who need to see it never will because they won’t come to this site, even if invited.

Besides which, if there are enough of them out there, people doing general searches for guns or gun owners or the Second Amendment could come across these photos instead of some generic picture attached to yet another stupid anti-gun screed from some mass media outlet.

Post to your twitters and facebooks and tumblrs. Create a tumblr for collecting them. A twitter feed to retweet them. Social media this like crazy. Get this on r/guns and /k/. Get ENDO in on it. Get oleg volk to take some so they look nice. Put aside crappy butt hurt blogger feels and get other rkba blogs on board.

Here’s an edited excerpt of an e-mail I wrote to RF when I sent in my pic:

[[“The first is me by myself, but I really like both the second and third ones with my son (2.5 years) and baby daughter (6 months). I think it puts this struggle over firearms rights into perspective – it’s about not only protecting our families, but passing on a legacy to our children and their future. One of my best memories as a child were the times spent with my father at the range, and teaching me to shoot using a little bolt action .22 rifle (before the other fun stuff, of course). Being a 4th generation American of Chinese descent, I have a special gratitude toward the opportunities my family has enjoyed in this country, and I want to be able to do the same thing some day with own children – to give the gift and responsibility of firearms ownership that stretches all the way back to their great-grandfather serving as a soldier in WW2.

I’m sure you’ll talk more about this photo campaign idea in a post on TTAG, but I was quite intentional about what I was wearing and how I looked in the photos – no brandishing a gun, no tacticool vests, belts, shirts, no camouflage, no mean mugging of the camera. The mainstream media wants to paint anyone who owns a gun as a ignorant redneck, a GI Joe wannabe, or bitter white guy polishing his AR in front of the camera, thirsty for the blood of innocents.

An effective grass roots campaign of all of us “average joe gun owners” taking pictures of ourselves with signs will destroy these stereotypes – gun owners are as diverse as America itself. Men, women, white, black, asian, people with dogs, people with kids – the better that we as a firearms community project the normalcy of owning a gun, the stronger the message that this attack on our freedoms that is thinly veiled as “protection against assault weapons” is ridiculous and does nothing to solve the real problem of human evil and violence. “]]

Let’s all hope that this can be a viral, person-to-person campaign through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, blogs, e-mail etc. Many of us have friends and family who don’t own guns, but are potential allies in the struggle to protect our existing rights. We need these people with us too!